Trump’s Motown Insult Was Really a Racist Dog Whistle, Here's Why

Donald Trump didn’t fool me when he told an audience that Kamala Harris would leave America “like Detroit.” I saw what he said for what it was: a throwback to a familiar divisiveness.

Trump’s Motown Insult Was Really a Racist Dog Whistle, Here's Why
Images: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain (Special appreciation to Détroit is the New Black)

As a teenager, I used to ride the Dexter bus through Detroit, whose route began just a block from where I attended high school, and wound 14 miles through the West Side before terminating downtown.

Along this route, I would see the most pristine three, four and five-bedroom Colonial and Tudor homes which lined boulevards where some of the city’s most well-off residents lived. But I also saw the still damaged remnants of the 1967 social unrest, and unreal poverty.

It passed through multiple working, poor and middle-class communities, by two universities; the Motown museum; General Motors headquarters; the Broadway play-hosting Fisher Theater; and Cass Corridor, which was filled with as many brilliantly creative artistic minds as it was prostitutes and drug addicts. In other words, anyone riding this bus could see the best and worst Detroit had to offer. 

But Detroiters have always been a gritty lot, and nobody can question their toughness or determination. They have always been there for the good and bad and if the city's a mess, it’s their mess. 

So during a speech given to the Detroit Economic Club last week, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, whose campaign strategy seems to be trafficking in mass paranoia about his opponent and lying about his achievements, told his audience: “Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she's your president.”

This was not just an insult to Detroiters, but really a much more nuanced racist dog whistle which took me back to some vivid memories of my days growing up. Let me explain.

Now, while there are people in Metro Detroit who are the tool and die, Motor City machine types. But there are also a number of aloof, condescending suburban elites who look down their noses at the city and its residents.

In 1974, then-newly elected Mayor Coleman Young said in his inaugural speech that criminals should “hit 8 Mile Road,” which meant he was warning them to leave the city – the busy artery being its northern boundary. But these particular elites resented that Detroit was fast becoming a majority Black town. To them his remarks meant that he wanted to send crime into the suburbs, something they deliberately misinterpreted and spread everywhere.

They further resented a Black mayor who 20 years prior told Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s political witch hunters exactly where to shove their accusations of communist sympathizing. These individuals were monied, powerful and worked very hard to create racial divisions in the region and whittle empowerment away from Black Detroiters.

Many in the current generation of these types were in attendance at the DEC speech when Trump made his remarks and his message to them was clear: Elect Kamala Harris and the country will become what Coleman Young made this city. Remember, this is the man who called nations run by Black people “shithole countries.”

Afro-American Mecca

I grew up hearing the rhetoric around how awful Detroit had become, how we were the “murder capital” and the constant bickering between city and suburb. It would be easy to convince the unfamiliar that they were in two warring nations. But it was true, the Motor City in 1986 had the nation’s highest per capita murder rate at 56.4 per 100,000 people, eight times the national average.

It was not unlike many other cities, which were in the midst of the crack epidemic 1980s. But we faced the unique problem of the auto industry, which had anchored Detroit for most of the century, collapsing and leaving hundreds of thousands unemployed. In 1982, for example, Michigan’s unemployment rate reached a high of 15.5 percent

Ultimately it led to major divestment from the city. For a long time there were no major grocery store chains within city limits, businesses shut down, retail stores fled to the suburbs, as did many residents, first white, then Black. By 1980, the city proper was majority Black in population. But it was a population that fell from 1.8 million in 1950, to just under 1 million in 2000, to about 639,000 currently, with a recent bump of a few thousand.

Before long, the media made an example of what a failed city Detroit was supposed to be and there were some journalists who made their careers demoralizing its residents that stayed. Thanks to them, America saw Detroit no different than it did a Third World country. Okay, enough with the full disclosure dirty laundry.

Through all of this, I saw Black people  (by this time we were Afro-Americans) whose parents had migrated from the American south and defied what the world was saying. I remember how they would be frustrated with life in Detroit, but were furious when an outsider made a disparaging remark, primarily because they did not understand their struggle. Many of these remarks were from the ignorant, or blatantly racist.

Detroiters rallied behind Young who had to find ways to keep the city operating after Ronald Reagan was elected and decided to cut needed federal funding for cities. The mayor had already partnered with auto magnate Henry Ford II to anchor downtown with the Renaissance Center, so that Detroiters would have a shining symbol in the skyline to identify with. It really did seem like it was us against the world.

Despite the declining population, Detroit’s Black middle class grew over the course of the 60s and 70s because many had retained employment in the auto industry and managed to keep good paying jobs in the plants that had not shut down. Others worked for public or quasi-public organizations or other private corporations. The wages they earned kept the entire region afloat economically and many of the suburban retail businesses were made wealthy because of it (my father, a Black small businessman, insisted this was a mistake).

This phenomenon continued until after the city was forced to declare bankruptcy in 2013. Most who left went to adjacent or nearby suburbs.

But I remember as a kid, there was this narrative, sort of an unspoken dialect that only people who lived in Detroit knew and could interpret. It was mainly African American Vernacular English ("Ebonics"), but in some places it was in Spanish and in others, Arabic or even Polish. Sure, it isolated us and sometimes made us oblivious to the rest of the world, but we also felt we were like no other people on the planet and that you had to be a certain type of special to survive there.

The narrative said, “we are who we are, nobody has to understand.” This is the spirit behind the “Detroit vs. Everybody,” “Made in Detroit,” and “Imported From Detroit” T-shirts that have been circulating.

Even now, when I run into a fellow native, the first thing we ask is what side they are from, East or West; what high school they went to; what neighborhood they’re from; and perhaps what church their family went to. Older folks who were born in the south will ask “where are your people from?” All of this tells us things that outsiders would not understand.

It’s hard to explain because I still feel it now that I'm in another city. It’s something you’d only understand if you’ve lived there and experienced the city’s challenges and allowed it to shape your character.

This is similar to the degrees of culture between New York's Five Boroughs, the North or South Sides of Chicago or the wards of New Orleans.

Trump’s Intention

In 2016, Michigan wound up in the GOP column. Believe me, Black Detroit did not want Trump – but the truth is not enough Black people voted at all. Hillary Clinton failed to connect with enough people in Southeast Michigan to convince them to go along with her, and Macomb County tipped the scales, allowing electors to favor Trump. It was a monumental blunder on her part that transformed the national political landscape.

So now that Trump is trying to regain the Oval Office, he has used racist dog whistles to signal people that immigrants are invading the country and that it’s Harris’ fault. He tried it in Aurora, Colorado, but it was a gross exaggeration. He tried it in Springfield, Ohio, but it was a pretty stupid hoax.

Detroit however doesn’t really have the migrant populations of other locales, and of the ones that are there, the city typically absorbs them efficiently. So he had to use the people who were there as scapegoats in his anti-Kamala treatise. It’s the usual folly, but he ignores the history of racial rhetoric aimed at the Motor City and uses it to weaponize people there who are still all-too-happy to continue their abrasiveness in hopes of subjugating a Black population they could not overpower years ago.

Michigan voted for Biden in 2020, and is seen as a crucial battleground state in the 2024 election. For Trump, keeping the historic divisiveness going is critical to his strategy. If he divides Metro Detoiters and ultimately Michiganders, then he can certainly win the state and possibly the election.

But if The D finds common ground with the ‘burbs, meaning Oakland, Macomb, and Western Wayne counties votes for what’s in their best interests, they’ll lock down the state’s population center. Trump will be shown that his racist crusade will not work among a people who, while diverse – ethnically and otherwise – prefer to be united.

Madison Gray is a New York City-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in multiple publications globally. Reach out to him at madison@starkravingmadison.com.